Friday, July 24, 2009

I'm not sure who this animator is. He moves things wonderfully but the drawings are kind of crude.Here's a real weird cut in the middle of the scene- to Rod Scribner.Now the animation gets really manic.This is a great gag - all visual.This held pose just before Daffy whacks him suggests that the caricatured silhouetted poses of Daffy VS the rounded poses of Porky from the Izzy Ellis scene were planned, rather than a lucky accident.Now it looks like a different animator again.This Daffy run/scramble cycle is amazing. It looks disconnected when you see it frame by frame but it moves perfectly at 24x per second.Another crazy idea in a cartoon full of them.Tons Of Crazy Action

25 comments:

A true high watermark in rubbery goodness. A highly influential scene for me.

Even when the background does come back, it's nothing but walls to play out the leg gag in. A lesson in not always having to fill in all the details and clutter the action. The trick is knowing when and where to use it. If it's done right, the audience shouldn't lose track of the overall setting, and those scenes highlight the characters interactions.

Looks like the screen shots leave off just before Porky comes charging...

I like how Daffy's hat falls off and reappears magically in the cut between animators, and seems to change size randomly. I wonder how much of a hurry they were in while animating this. Perhaps the actual production of the cartoon was similar in pace to the cartoon itself. I like to imagine that, anyway, with all the animators running around hooting like Daffy and tripping over each other with animation paper flying all over.

I've watched this cartoon dozens of times and I'm still discovering new weird details. For instance, this is the first time I noticed that Daffy's giant hat flies off-screen, and a new little hat pops onto his head during the jump cut, the placement of it in front of Porky's hat makes the transition almost imperceptable. When I think of all the energy we frequently put into continuity in modern catoons, something like this really makes you realize what a waste of time that is.

I think this has to be the most cartoony cartoon i ever came across. I always found it disturbing how much we're willing to accept and this cartoon illustrates just that.

Each frame is so well executed.

Your attention to drawing detail scares me John. I've made the point to never cheat on my drawings again, but you keep reaffirming your eye for solid drawing, it makes me realise i have a long way to go!

I always thought the animator just before Rod and after Izzy was Bill Melendez in this sequence. It looks most like his, less like Manny Gould, and it would make sense since Bill was Rod's assistant at this time.

Every time I watch this scene, I get distracted because of that weird "aw cut it out, leggo my leg" part. It starts off being almost definitely Porky's voice, but then it gets hard to tell, and it makes more sense for Daffy to be saying it. I wonder what caused that... Mel Blanc recorded each character's lines separately, right? So I guess nobody realized that he was sounding more like Porky on that line until in the actual cartoon, where you can really hear the similarity.

The animation here is stellar, as always with Rod Scribner, but as a whole, I find this cartoon a little too crazy.

i'm with jc roberts on his comment there. the backgrounds in this cartoon are totally surreal...because they're virtually nonexistent! it definitely guides the eye and makes everything more frantic somehow, almost claustrophobic

Hey John this might be hard for me to explain what I'm trying to ask but here it goes: when this cartoon was animated, did each animator have to animate porky and daffy or was one character assigned to one animator and the other assigned to a different animator for the same scene? I realize that different animators were given different parts of the cartoon to animate but was it only one animator for each part or 2? I ask this because I know some cartoons assign certain characters to certain animators. I would imagine with this cartoon that it was only one animator for each scene because of the amount of interaction that the characters have with each other.

I think I can answer drawingtherightway's question about who's animating what.

It seems to me most of the time all the characters are handled by the same animator while it's his turn at bat. It's often evident on all the characters, as all the touches more unique to each animator are evident.

The scene in The Gruesome Twosome" on the the Golden Collection #3 set, where John points it out in the commentary, is a good example of this. It's easy to see both cats start as McKimson's well drafted look, go behind the wall, and pop back up as Scribner's living, breathing balloon animals.

There may be exceptions to this, they may have employed every type of combination along the way, and it's not going to get any easier to get those types of details with so many of them gone now, but I think the practice of having animators specialize in certain characters is more of a Disney thing. And any studios trying to copy their formulas.

I prefer Clampett's approach, it keeps you on your toes watching it. I try to learn different stylistic influences so I can switch between them and hopefully get some of that feeling. It's harder for a one man band to do that, but I make the effort.

I'll never forget the first time I saw that cartoon. The scene where Daffy gets his leg all stretched out like taffy and then he's running and his stretched-out leg gives him this gigantic limp...IT WAS JUST TOO WRONG!!! I loved it.

Thanks for the response J C Roberts! Yeah I too mainly heard of Disney using specific animators for specific characters. If a studio uses this approach, how do they animate it if 2 characters have to actually come in contact with each other? I would think it would be too difficult because suppose a character has to grab the other by the throat how do they know exactly how to draw the position of the hands on the throat if one animator has one character and the other animator has another? Even if they wait for one of them to complete their character drawings, that's a lot of time wasted and it would be difficult to line the drawings up. To me it would make more sense if only one animator drew the characters that make contact in a scene. Maybe this is how they do it if contact is needed.

Wow, I sure didn't get much pure crazy physical comedy like Porky balancing on his tongue or Daffy's leg getting stretched a mile long on the Loony Tunes they showed on Saturday morning network TV as a kid! I was robbed! This is an awesome scene, thanks for showing it.

The main way they deal with this issue is that in a Disney film, there ain't gonna be much throat grabbing to worry about. They just have to worry about making sassyexpressions and cocking one eyebrow.